12 Reasons Why Your Facebook Ads Are Not Delivering

You have decided to promote your business on Facebook, but no matter what you do, your Facebook ads are not delivering? In this article, we will take a look at 12 common reasons why it happens and ways to fix it.

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”.

That’s one of the most popular Albert Einstein’s quotes.

And you know, it’s all true.

When babies take their first steps, they fall. When children learn to write, they often misspell. Even when adults start speaking a new language, they mess up.

It makes no difference how old or smart we are – we all make mistakes when we start doing something new.

Dropshipping mistakes are not an exception: they can happen at any point of one’s business journey, and it’s not a big deal. The main thing is to pay attention and learn from them.

A lot of dropshippers and traditional online store owners use Facebook to promote their businesses. It’s a great platform for posting content and promoting products. But newcomers often say their Facebook ads don’t work.

Trust me, it’s not Facebook’s fault. It’s probably you doing something wrong. So, let’s see why your Facebook campaign is not delivering.

1. You are targeting a too broad Facebook audience

The first problem can be related to your Facebook ad reach. No matter how good your Facebook ad is, if it’s shown to the wrong audience, it will be useless. Of course, you may think that everyone is your potential client, but this is not true.

Just yesterday, my feed demonstrated me an ad for industrial chimneys. No kidding, industrial chimneys are made of special steel and used for venting out hot gases from boilers. O_o

I was looking at this ad and thinking “Why? Why me? Are all 25-year-old women really interested in this field? Am I missing anything?”

However, the problem wasn’t me. It was a doubtful decision of some marketing managers who, for some reason, decided to target ages 1-100.

And made one of the biggest Facebook ad mistakes.

Ad delivery depends on many factors but first of all on how relevant your ads are. There’s no point advertising cute plush toys to middle-aged men, for example.

If you want to avoid this crucial mistake, you need to follow the next tips:

Use Facebook Audience Insights to learn more about your target audience (geography, gender, age, purchasing behavior, etc.)
Try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and determine their interests
Exclude countries your suppliers don’t deliver to
Choose and set up the same language as your website’s language

This will allow you to narrow your audience and reach the people who are interested in your products.

2. You are targeting a too narrow audience

Another common reason why your Facebook ad is not delivering is that you’re targeting too few audiences. Yes, you get it right: targeting a too narrow audience on Facebook is as bad as targeting a too broad one.

In order not to make this mistake, don’t focus on very specific interests. For example, what if you’re advertising to “American men who like Toyota and live in New York”? Isn’t this Facebook audience too small?

By targeting it, you will lose a great number of potential clients. Instead of this, you can just target “Americans who like Japanese cars” and get better results.

In addition, you have to remember that the narrower your audience is, the more expensive your clicks are. So you’ll pay more when advertising to New Yorkers who like Toyotas than to Americans who are keen on the Japanese auto industry.

Besides that, we recommend that you don’t exclude the countries you want to avoid just for personal reasons. They may easily turn out to be a gold mine of customers.

3. You’re making low-quality ads

Let’s suppose you’re targeting not one but several Facebook audiences demonstrating interest in your product. No problem here. Nevertheless, your campaign’s delivery is not sufficient. What could be wrong?

My guess is your ads don’t draw any attention. They’re boring or not informative enough to provide a high enough level of delivery. So, how do you fix it?

Facebook ads are always visual. It means that users initially look at the pictures and only after that start reading the message. That’s why you need to take care of the images you use.

They should be:

Relevant to your offer
Bright and eye-catching
Of the right size and ratio
Clear of any political, sexual or shocking elements
Showing a product in action (show how your product works to impress the viewers)

Besides that, we don’t recommend placing too much text in the ad. Your message should be short and clear, otherwise, there is a great chance that it won’t be delivered.

And here’s another tip from the team of AliDropship: Facebook ads work best when you use videos. The team’s experience with our self-owned dropshipping stores has shown that people tend to pay more attention to such ads. When you see a video, it’s dynamic, it’s changing and shows you one thing after another.

But to make such videos eye-catching, you’ll need to work on its beginning very carefully.

In addition, we recommend that you visit the Facebook Ads Help Center and take your time to study the tips on how to create great Facebook ads.

4. You don’t do split testing

No matter how much experience you have, you never know for sure why certain Facebook ads are not working while others get good results. Sometimes ad sets, from which you didn’t really expect too much, turn out to be your best-performing materials, and you can’t tell why.

That’s why marketers can’t do without split testing.

Even if your ad brings you sales and clients, you can experiment with different campaign elements such as headlines, images, image texts, or call-to-actions to find out what works best.

This tactic is called split testing.

As a rule, marketing specialists transform only one element of the ad to see how people respond to the changes. For example, you can test two completely identical ads except one of them has a different image text. But when you test ads with two or more different elements, it’s hard to tell which of the elements makes the difference.

So, if you publish product pictures featuring people, as an alternative, try posting some photos of the same product with no people on them. You will be able to measure the effectiveness of these ways of the product presentation and choose the best one.

Here are some more Facebook split testing ideas:

Ad types
Facebook ad placement
Types of pictures (stock images or professional photos)
Ad image colors (light or dark)
The length of your ad (short or long)
Ad headlines (with or without numbers)
The word order of the sentences

As a rule, these tests take several days or even weeks, so you need to arm yourself with patience when waiting for the first results. Try not to pause or tweak your ads until you’ve reached at least 1000 people!

5. You test only one type of Facebook ad format

Facebook ads not delivering although you did some split testing? It’s probably because you’re sticking to one ad format only.

Using and testing only one type of Facebook ad formats is a road to nowhere.

First, the chosen ad format might not be consistent with your objectives. I’m sure you will agree that it’s a poor decision to place photos if you can tell your story with a short video.

Plus, you can’t be 100% sure that other ad formats won’t bring you better results.

So, we highly recommend that you test all types of Facebook ad formats and choose the ones that your audience best responds to.

6. You use the ideas that proved inefficient

Let’s say you’ve already used messenger ads 1000 times and you can safely say that they do not bring you the desired results. However, you are still full of hope and continue using them. Or you create new ads and try different ad formats but still target the audiences that are clearly not interested in your offer.

Why do some entrepreneurs do that?

Frankly speaking, I don’t know. But most people make this mistake very often, which leads to their Facebook ads not delivering.

Remember, if you have tested an ad and you’re 100% sure that it doesn’t work for you, you need to get rid of this with no regrets.

7. You’re setting up a too low or too high daily budget

Setting up an inadequate advertising budget can also lead to your Facebook ads not delivering.

If your Facebook ads campaign budget is too low (less than $10 per ad set), it won’t be possible for you to cover your whole audience. It means that not all potential customers will see your ad. However, if your daily budget is too high (more than $100 per ad set), you will just waste your money.

You have to remember that your ad is competing against other ads and yours has to stand out from the crowd. This is only possible if you set a reasonable daily budget that will allow you to reach your target audience.

You can raise the budget to a hundred dollars per ad set or even more only if a certain ad or ad set performs really well. But even in this case, one should watch it carefully and lower the budget as soon as the ad’s performance drops.

8. You keep showing your introductory Facebook ads to past purchasers

Well, you know how it happens. You order a pair of shoes online, and next two weeks, you’re being followed by a shoe ad.

Showing the same Facebook ad to the people who have already bought something from you is also a waste of time and money. These ads are no longer relevant for them. Besides, when people see the same ad over and over again (after they actually bought your product), they usually find it annoying. No wonder your Facebook ads are not delivering!

That’s why you need to exclude all past buyers from your newcomer-aimed advertising campaign and add them to another one – an ad campaign designed specifically for warmer audiences. Otherwise, you will lose your money hand over fist.

9. You don’t prepare your website for advertising

That’s quite a common reason why your Facebook ads are not delivering. Beginner entrepreneurs focus on promotion so much that they totally forget about their site. And what happens when you spend days trying to invite as many people to a party as possible and forget to prepare for the party?

That’s right! The guests get disappointed and leave.

Same goes for digital marketing. Creating a great ad is not enough to make people buy from you.

If a person comes to your website and sees products without pictures or reviews, he or she will definitely leave your store. That’s why before starting any promotion campaigns on Facebook, you need to prepare your products for advertising.

Make sure that all the product pages have high-quality pictures and lots of customer reviews with photos. What’s more, check if the price in your ad corresponds to the price in your store! If it doesn’t, people will be unhappy about your offer and your store in general.

Also, while it’s really important to make your whole site look good, you want to pay extra… no, ultra-attention to the page of the product you want to advertise.

Besides that, you can set pop-up ads on your website in order to collect emails and use them for your future advertising campaigns.

10. You launch Facebook ads at a random time

When do you usually launch your Facebook ads? Do you have a schedule based on research? Or do you just trust your instincts?

Timing is a very frequent Facebook ad mistake. That’s why you need to consider the time zone and lifestyle of your audience. For example, if you’re advertising for moms in the USA, your ads have to be shown around 9 pm after the kids have gone to bed in this time zone.

To plan your Facebook ads correctly, we strongly recommend that you study your audience carefully: who are these people, where do they live, what is their lifestyle, etc.

11. You violate the 20% text rule

Not so long ago, Facebook used to penalize ads if the amount of text on them exceeded 20%. Right now, this rule is no longer applied.

Nevertheless, it was made up not for nothing. Images with less than 20% text (including video ad thumbnails) tend to perform better. Too much text scares people, which lowers the engagement level and ultimately the conversion rate of your ads.

So, this could be the reason for your Facebook ads’ low reach.

12. Your ads have been disapproved

Before an ad starts running, Facebook must approve it. Whether it will or will not happen depends on many factors including the content of your ad copy. For example, Facebook will never allow you to advertise gambling unless you get its permission first.

You can find the list of restricted and prohibited content here. In most cases, you just have to avoid such topics as drugs, violence, politics, racism, and anything you can call “sensible”.

The problem is you can’t always predict how Facebook (or the audience) will perceive your message. What looks Ok to you may look offensive to others. Moreover, violating these policies may lead to your ad account getting banned once and for all.

That’s why you’d better avoid such topics at all!

I hope these tips will help you understand why your Facebook ads are not delivering. Or help you avoid such situations if you only plan on starting an ecommerce business and promoting it on Facebook.